I’ve been playing with OAuth a bit lately. The OAuth specification fulfills a role that some people saw as a failing of OpenID: programmatic access to websites and authenticated web services. The expectation that OpenID would handle these cases seems a bit misguided since the two uses cases are quite different:

OpenID is designed on the principle of letting arbitrary OpenID providers talk to arbitrary relying parties and vice versa.

OpenID is intentionally vague about how the provider authenticates the user. The only restriction is that the authentication must be able to fit into a web browsing session between the user and provider.

While these are quite useful features for a decentralised user authentication scheme, the requirements for web service authentication are quite different:

There is a tighter coupling between the service provider and client. A client designed to talk to a photo sharing service won’t have much luck if you point it at a micro-blogging service.

Involving a web browser session in the authentication process for individual web service request is not a workable solution: the client might be designed to run offline for instance.

While the idea of a universal web services client is not achievable, there are areas of commonality between different the services: gaining authorisation from the user and authenticating individual requests. This is the area that OAuth targets.

While it has different applications, it is possible to compare some of the choices made in the protocol:

The secrets for request and access tokens are sent to the client in the clear. So at a minimum, a service provider’s request token URL and access token URL should be served over SSL. OpenID nominally avoids this by using Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange to avoid evesdropping, but ended up needing it to avoid man in the middle attacks. So sending them in the clear is probably a more honest approach.

Actual web service methods can be authenticated over plain HTTP in a fairly secure means using the HMAC-SHA1 or RSA-SHA1 signature methods. Although if you’re using SSL anyway, the PLAINTEXT authentication method is probably not any worse than HMAC-SHA1.

The authentication protocol supports both web applications and desktop applications. Though any security gained through consumer secrets is invalidated for desktop applications, since anyone with a copy of the application will necessarily have access to the secrets. A few other points follow on from this:

The RSA-SHA1 signature method is not appropriate for use by desktop applications. The signature is based only on information available in the web service request and the RSA key associated with the consumer, and the private key will need to be distributed as part of the application. So if an attacker discovers an access token (not access token secret), they can authenticate.

The other two authentication methods — HMAC-SHA1 and PLAINTEXT — depend on an access token secret. Along with the access token, this is essentially a proxy for the user name and password, so should be protected as such (e.g. via the GNOME keyring). It still sounds better than storing passwords directly, since the token won’t give access to unrelated sites the user happened to use the same password on, and can be revoked independently of changing the password.

While the OpenID folks found a need for a formal extension mechanism for version 2.0 of that protocol, nothing like that seems to have been added to OAuth. There are now a number of proposed extensions for OAuth, so it probably would have been a good idea. Perhaps it isn’t as big a deal, due to tigher coupling of service providers and consumers, but I could imagine it being useful as the two parties evolve over time.

So the standard seems decent enough, and better than trying to design such a system yourself. Like OpenID, it’ll probably take until the second release of the specification for some of the ambiguities to be taken care of and for wider adoption.

From the Python programmer point of view, things could be better. The library available from the OAuth site seems quite immature and lacks support for a few aspects of the protocol. It looks okay for simpler uses, but may be difficult to extend for use in more complicated projects.